


Where the Heart Is

by JoJo



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Episode Related, Episode: s05e19 Kahania (Close Shave), Homecoming, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-01
Updated: 2016-09-01
Packaged: 2018-08-12 09:21:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7929337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JoJo/pseuds/JoJo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Certain things need to be in place before Danny feels he's really home</p>
            </blockquote>





	Where the Heart Is

**Author's Note:**

There was no denying that O'ahu was most people’s idea of Heaven. Especially flying in midway through the day when the sun was high and it lay full of promise in the silent, sparkling blue. Even more especially – some might say – coming from the noisy brown and gray of a New Jersey blanketed in smog. 

The view was so intensely beautiful it could take your breath away. Well, that was what McGarrett said – although probably only when sentimental from booze. So beautiful it hurt your eyes was more what Danny thought, not always in private. 

Right now he dragged his attention from the unrelenting expanse of ocean, needing to find the right head space. The home head space.

“Sir? We’re on approach.”

Danny blinked at the flight attendant leaning towards him across two empty seats.

“Fine, yes, we’re good, I’m ready.” He flipped up the table. Then he rubbed his hands together, nervous. 

They’d been over ten hours in the air from Newark, and he’d been thinking about deep vein thrombosis on and off for the last four. Couldn't help himself. Taking in the view over Waikiki he'd been filled with the usual brew of clashing emotions. Anxiety, relief, fear, elation.

You are not returning into battle, Williams, he told himself. I know it feels like that. But you are coming home, to the beautiful home where your beautiful daughter is waiting.

Home.

He hardly registered the bump of the runway. Felt oddly detached as he shuffled towards the aircraft exit door, waited too long at the carousel.

But, travel-hardened mainlander, Danny figured at least he was native enough to sail through the rest of arrivals quicker than most. Away from the crumpled, befuddled tourists and the airport fumes, out into the earthly paradise of the pick-up zone.

There was a salty tang on the wind, and the scent of frangipani. As usual everything here was too bright and sunny. 

Just over eleven hours out of Newark now, and despite the fact that Chin’s car door was hanging open in welcome, Danny still hadn’t arrived.

“Aloha, brother.”

Chin was smiling. He was in a loud shirt, genuinely delighted to see him.

“Hello,” Danny said, straight, throwing his bag in the back seat. He loosened his tie, a first concession. Custom and manners dictated that he always traveled in a tie, but the very informality of Chin and his car were hard to fight.

All those things, the bright and sunny, the smells, informality, the aloha... they should draw him back in. Right now they just had the effect of underlining how far away he was. How very far.

The smile coming at him from the driver's seat dialed down a notch although it didn’t fade altogether. Danny appreciated the hell out of the fact Chin understood how hard re-entry was.

It was only once they were away from the airport and on the highway to downtown, that Kelly said anything else. 

“How was the trip, bro?”

“The trip?” Danny squinted into the glare. He dug for his sunglasses, rammed them on his face. “Oh, the trip. It was fine. Old case. New lawyers. I was in court maybe half an hour. It was all good.”

“We missed you.” Danny didn’t look over but he could tell from Chin’s voice that he was smiling full out again. 

“Yeah, well. I missed you too.” 

“How are the family doing?”

Danny let the air from the open windows whip at his hair, tried not to mind. “They were pleased to see me. As in, extra pleased to see me, surviving son.” He sucked his teeth. “Which is, you know, good and bad.”

“I know.”

Well, of course he didn’t really know, not having had a brother cut up and put in a barrel, but Danny was well aware Chin ached for him anyhow.

“Anything happen while I was gone? Anyone get in any trouble?”

“I really can't think what you mean.” 

“Of course you can’t. Let me spell it out. Any kind of anti-social or psychotic behavior I need to get uptight about? Unscheduled trips to the ER, stuff like that?”

The minuscule beat before Chin replied was concerning. “We’re all fine, Danny.”

“Good. But I’m coming in to check it out for myself. Before I go meet my girl from school.”

“Of course you are.”

On the way in through the lobby they met Kono coming out.

Newly affianced, she still had that loved-up glow about her that Danny found both deeply worrying and pleasing. She hugged him, warm and real as the sunshine outside. Then she quirked a brow at her cousin, sassy. “You want to go play? HPD just radioed in about some kids tampering with cars outside City Hall.”

“Go,” Danny said, holding the elevator doors. “I mean, I can leave you to it, right? You don’t need back up on this?”

“Apparently they’re fourth graders, but we’ll let you know.” Kono grinned. “And we’ll catch up later.”

Danny envisaged one of the beachside bars they favored. Longboards, fairy lights, sand in his shoes, the sound of the surf. A pleasant enough thought, but still the stuff of vacations, not of home. The aircraft sounds were still dinging in his head. He imagined he could taste the very good breakfast he’d had at Jersey Mike’s.

Real life was back there somewhere, over his shoulder. Or up in the sky, waiting for the landing gear to drop.

“Right,” he said.

As he was dumping his bag down in his office, the door swung open to admit the top half of Grover.

“My man! Good to see you!”

Just like Chin, Lou was, genuinely, delighted. 

Strange, but true.

“It was only five days,” Danny pointed out, “but I appreciate it, thank you. We busy?”

“Not yet.” Grover brought the rest of himself in, scratched the underside of his jaw. “Just give it time.” He gestured at the bag. “If you’ve got any sense you’ll say hi to your boy, scroll down the first page of the emails you got waiting for you, not read any of them, and then get the hell back out of here.”

Danny could see his boy through the glass. 

McGarrett was standing by his desk talking to some guy in a suit who looked as if he was from the Governor’s office. It appeared a polite, unanimated conversation, but Steve seemed ill at ease, wary. Danny couldn’t see any of those alarming telltale signs he dreaded. No steri-strips to the face, no visible bruises or bandages. The body language was all wrong though. He frowned, let his eyes slide to Grover.

“There anything I need to know, Lou?”

Grover pursed his lips. “It’s been a rough week.”

Danny made an ‘oh, now let’s see,’ face, nodding slowly. “Like rough for everybody rough?”

“Well, long hours, you know, a lot of bullshit going on. Steve didn't say anything, but we reckon he'd been been chewing over whatever Joe White told him lately about his mother. Then yesterday there was this... siege situation.”

“His mother,” Danny repeated, stomach dropping several floors to the sidewalk. “Siege situation.”

“At that guy Odell’s barbershop? Some Armenians, early in the morning.”

Danny crunched his brows, pained by that. “Wait, he got himself shot at early in the morning at a barbershop? By Armenians?”

“Pretty much.”

Grover, for all his size, was as light and fidgety as a cat on coals. Which told Danny there was more.

He glanced back into McGarrett’s office. Steve – his boy – had just slouched, weary, on one hip. He’d run the flat of his hand, slowly, from one side of his forehead to the other. It was a sign of weakness. And Steve didn’t do weakness, particularly not in front of civilian authority figures. The guy in the suit, who really looked like nobody in particular, was still talking, still not animated.

"What, Lou?"

“Kind of a long story. Some nasty, sick son-of-a-bitch got taken down. And it was just very rough.”

“Because why?”

Taking down nasty, sick son-of-a-bitches was meat and drink to all of them – it didn’t warrant Grover’s lengthy sigh, hadn’t warranted Chin’s moment of hestitation in the car.

“Well, he’d have to tell you.” Grover looked bleak, and Danny didn’t like that, didn’t like it at all. “There were kids, Danny, really little kids. So many of them, man. I just, it was really... rough.” He trailed off.

Danny swallowed, looked back to the office. McGarrett was nodding, holding out his hand to say goodbye, formal. He was still guarded, closed up. In truth he looked beyond exhausted, even though Danny couldn’t see his face properly.

The guy in the suit exited, turned a brief look through the glass. Danny gave him a thumbs up.

“Anything to do with the rough?” he asked, looking back into McGarrett's office.

Grover shook his head. “Just some policy wonk.” McGarrett was looking at them, absent and unsmiling. The normal spark in his eye was worryingly absent. As if it had been stunned out of him.

“Oh boy,” Danny said.

“I’ll leave you two to your reunion.” Grover paused, squeezed his shoulder. “Do what you can.”

Danny stood where he was, waiting, hands on hips. McGarrett and Grover passed each other in the doorway, and then Steve was there. Slouching more than standing, in a washed-up navy blue t-shirt and dark cargo pants. The badge at his hip seemed almost to be weighing him down. There were grim purple shadows under his eyes, too. Danny gestured in annoyance. He bitterly resented the world piling crap on people he loved.

“Steven.” He was nagging, mostly to hide his anxiety. “You look like crap, gotta tell you, buddy.”

“Good to see you too.” The words came out in a half stutter of too much coffee. “How was the trip?”

Danny shook his head. His throat had closed up at all the suppressed grief on display. “I go away for a few days and what? You go to pieces on me?”

And then Steve’s hand was up once more, almost shaky, fingers smoothing faultlines across his brow. Which, to be honest, was really Danny’s job. 

“Nothing like that.” McGarrett took a quick breath. He visibly hauled himself upright, giving in to the discipline. Danny inwardly sighed, hating that re-calibrating thing his partner did. That brutal, toughing-it-out routine bludgeoned into his psyche. “It was just...”

“Hey.” Danny held up a hand, moved closer. His voice leveled out, soft and fond. “You don’t have to explain, all right?” 

Two familiar little creases formed between Steve’s brows. 

“Glad you’re here, Danno.”

“I’ll bet you are.” Danny moved closer still, touched him on the ribs. He felt heat and tension, the slightest twitch of muscle. For a moment it seemed as if Steve’s whole skeleton might crumble into a pile on his office floor, just from that one little touch. Danny kept his hand in solid contact anyway. “Easy, you big lug. Do me a favor and save the collapse until later, all right? You going to get through the day?”

“Yeah. You know, I really think so,” McGarrett said, looking into his face, searching. After a second or two there was the smallest curve at one side of his lips. And then, sluggish as hell, the missing spark in his eyes flickered back into life. 

Danny's stomach clenched in relief.

Coming up for twelve hours out of Newark, the wheels finally touched down on home soil.

 

-ends-

 


End file.
